Everything We Know So Far About Apple M1 Chip

Aadhya Khatri - Nov 12, 2020

Apple recently introduced three new Macs with M1 chips. The launch marks Apple’s transition from Intel chips to its home-grown processors

Apple recently introduced three new Macs with M1 chips. The launch marks Apple’s transition from Intel chips to its home-grown processors.

The new chip allows for all sort of cool features, let’s take a look at what’s new:

Specifications

M1 is an eight-core chip, four for performance and the rest is for efficiency. Apple claimed a 3.5x boost in overall performance with any Macs powered by its chip. The processor also sports a 12MB L2 cache for faster data processing.

M1 Gpu — M1 is an eight-core chip, four for performance and the rest is for efficiency

Thanks to the 5nm fabrication process, M1 has 16 billion transistors, which might lead to a 120mm² sized processor.

We also have a GPU with eight cores for 6x performance. According to Apple, the GPU can handle 25,000 threads at the same time, meaning it’s capable of several 4K streams and 3D graphics rendering.

The package is complete with a 16-core neural engine that can run 11 trillion operations each second.

The ARM-based CPU can work with USB-4 and Thunderbolt, which means we may have a data transfer speed of up to 40Gbps.

Security-wise, it possesses the most modern storage controller, Secure Enclave, and AES encryption hardware. It’s worth pointing out that macOS Big Sur has support for run-time protection.

What Does It Mean?

Apple claims that the new Macs are capable of 18 to 20 hours of video playback. Mix usage might lower the number a bit but around 12 hours of use with a single charge is impressive enough.

Macbook Pro M1 Chip — Apple claims that the new Macs are capable of 18 to 20 hours of video playback

The unified memory architecture means different CPU resources don’t have to go again and again to data pools to retrieve data, leading to a much faster processing time.

One of the best features on M1 Macs is nearly instant wake up. Macs with Intel chips already had a short wake-up time and now we have something even faster than that.

The Imagine Signal Processor is believed to enhance video call quality even if the hardware has no upgrade.

The same ARM architecture allows macOS to run iOS apps.

Limitations

For now, there are two drawbacks of the ARM-based chips, one is the Dynamic RAM, which makes an upgrade in RAM impossible. And second, the chip has no support for external graphics cards.

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